Obama defends collecting phone data

President Obama appears in San Jose with Monica Lozano of ImpreMedia and Dr. Robert Ross of California Endowment.

President Obama appears in San Jose with Monica Lozano of ImpreMedia and Dr. Robert Ross of California Endowment.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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President Obama leaves the podium after discussing health care and national security officials keeping phone records.

President Obama leaves the podium after discussing health care and national security officials keeping phone records.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Obama defends collecting phone data

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President Obama sought to reassure Americans Friday that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls" after a series of reports that the nation's surveillance program is collecting volumes of phone records and Internet footprints from millions of Americans.

Obama, in comments to reporters during his visit to San Jose, defended the programs as legal and useful to "help us prevent terrorist attacks."

But that drew objections Friday, not only from civil libertarians and privacy advocates but from some of his staunchest liberal defenders in Congress, including Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, who ripped the surveillance program as too sweeping.

"I voted against the Patriot Act, the overly broad law that the administration is using to justify this surveillance, for this reason," Lee said Friday. "The right to privacy in this country is nonnegotiable."

That concern has been growing this week, as news outlets have reported that the National Security Agency and the FBI have tapped into the servers of Internet companies - including Google, Apple and Facebook - potentially to gain unprecedented access to e-mails, photographs, video and online searches. The program's code name: PRISM.

Those news reports came after the Guardian newspaper in Britain reported that a court order allowed U.S. government intelligence gatherers to comb through the daily record of all phone traffic from the communications giant Verizon in the hunt for links to terrorists.

But Obama, in an appearance in San Jose that was ostensibly to talk about his health care program, defended the government surveillance, which, as a U.S. senator and a Democratic candidate for president in 2008, he had vilified.

Or, as Obama recast his change of heart Friday, he came into office with "a healthy skepticism about these programs." He has since softened.

Approval of a judge

Under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly known as FISA, a federal judge must approve any request to look at top-line information such as phone records. This "metadata" could provide clues that point to potential terrorists.

Should the government want to further probe subjects - by listening to their phone calls, for example - it would have to obtain an additional court order, Obama said.

"What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people's names, and they're not looking at content," Obama said.

Still, Obama acknowledged that there were trade-offs involved in trying to strike a balance between thwarting terrorist plots and invading Americans' privacy.

"It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama told reporters Friday at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

'False dichotomy'

But one security analyst said that Obama is offering Americans a "false dichotomy."

"No one is saying that the NSA shouldn't be investigating terrorism," said Nate Cardozo, an attorney and digital privacy expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which has been at the forefront of the issue. "We're saying that whenever you give the government these sorts of powers, you have to pair them with transparency.

"The intelligence community has a history of abusing these sorts of powers. Obama is asking us to trust the secret government attorney's interpretations of FISA and the Patriot Act. We don't trust them. You can't have a secret interpretation of law being applied by the secret court and then just say trust us. That's not how democracy works."

Obama said Friday that his comments were "not to suggest that you just say, 'trust me.' "

"We're doing the right thing," he said. "We know who the bad guys are. And the reason that's not how it works is because we've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight."

But some critics say the administration has been duplicitous.

When National Intelligence Director James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March, he was asked if the NSA "collect(s) any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper replied: "No, sir." He added, "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

"They're not being truthful to Congress," Cardozo said Friday. "So if Obama is saying, 'Trust us, because there is congressional oversight,' we know that the congressional oversight is, at this point, ineffective. If Clapper is lying under oath to Congress, then there is no oversight."

Politicians split

On Capitol Hill, politicians are splintering on the issue - and not along party lines as they usually do. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, believes that the program is "legal" but wants to see more oversight.

Pointing out that she voted against the extension of FISA late last year, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, said that recent revelations "show this law is flawed."

But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the program, saying "there have been approximately 100 plots, and also arrests, made since 2009 by the FBI. I do not know to what extent metadata was used, but ... terrorists will come after us if they can, and the only thing we have to deter this is good intelligence."

"It's called protecting America," Feinstein said.

Feinstein's line is now being used in an online ad and petition created by the liberal online advocacy group, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, calling for a congressional investigation.

Over a photo of Feinstein's "It's called protecting America" quote, the ad says, "No, senator, it's called overreach."